Sula

Written by Toni Morrison, this tragic tale is woven mainly around two families in the black section of a small Ohio town in the USA, spanning from 1919 to 1965: Eva Peace and her family; Helene Wright and her family. Sula is Eva’s granddaughter, while Nellie is Helene’s daughter. Their tight childhood friendship is marked by a shared secret—the accidental drowning of a young boy who slipped from Sula’s hand while she was playfully spinning him around in the air close to a river. After high school Nel marries and settles down to have kids, while Sula goes off to college and the cities. Ten years later, Sula turns up unexpectedly in town, apparently a totally changed woman, independent-minded and not eager to please anyone. For the period covered, the tale is rather short, the chapters spaced one to several years apart, reading more like snapshots.

Apart from the accidental drowning, there are other unexpected violent deaths and revelations as well. Sula’s brother Plum after returning from World War I mentally and psychologically changed, lived a withdrawn life, until Eva’s patience ran out with him and she decided to terminate it with her own hands, setting him afire on his bed. Eva herself, had come into a little money within a year under suspicious circumstances, after her husband fled leaving her with three kids and no money. Sula overheard her mother admit to her friends that she loved her dutifully but didn’t like her. So when her mother’s dress caught fire, she felt no qualms watching her burn to death. Sula’s notorious life after returning to the town, such as sleeping freely with the men including her friend Nel’s husband, led the entire black population to consider her an evil outcast. Years after kicking Eva out of her own house to an old peoples’ home, there was no one with her at her time of sudden death from an undisclosed illness. She had to be buried by strangers, the white people. To cap it all was the closing tale of the mass death of several people in an uncompleted river tunnel, during a sudden fit of violent demonstration of their frustrations from being excluded from the building of the tunnel.

Sula is the shocking tale of what life could be like in poor black communities, especially for the women: Absentee husbands, the struggle to make ends meet, sometimes by any means, white racial discrimination, the pursuit of straightened hair, sex and relationships with men. It was an Oprah Book Club selection.

January 12, 2015. Novel first published in 1973 by Knopf; this Penguin Books (Plume) edition was published in 1982, ISBN 0-452-26349-2.